The holiday season hasn’t started yet, but some of us are already gearing up for CES 2025. Shortly after New Year’s Day, many from the Engadget team will be packing our bags to fly to Las Vegas, where we’ll be covering the biggest annual tech event. conference. As always, our inboxes are full of pitches from companies planning to be there, and our calendars are filling up with informational appointments and demos.
Based on our experience, and noting the latest industry trends, it’s easy to make educated guesses about what we might see in January. Over the years, the conference has focused on areas such as TVs, cars, smart home products and personal life, where portable laptops and other devices have been thrown. At CES 2025, we expect to see AI populating all over the place. of the display floor. But we’re also likely to get the usual slew of new processors and laptops next, as well as all kinds of wearables, trackers, home appliances and massage chairs. Oh, massage chairs.
If you’re already looking ahead to 2025 and eagerly researching what’s coming in January, here’s a taste of what our team expects to see at the show.
New video cards from AMD and NVIDIA
There is no doubt that 2025 will be an important year for PC gamers. NVIDIA is expected to release its long-awaited RTX 5000 video cards at CES, while AMD CEO Lisa Su confirmed that we will see the next generation RDNA 4 GPU early next year. Of these two companies, AMD could use more development. Its last batch of Radeon 7000 cards were mid-range players, but they still lag far behind NVIDIA’s hardware when it comes to ray tracing, and AMD’s FSR 3 upscaling also couldn’t compete with NVIDIA’s AI-powered DLSS 3.
“In addition to the dramatic increase in gaming performance, RDNA 4 brings even higher ray tracing performance and adds new AI capabilities,” AMD CEO Lisa Su said on an October earnings call.
As for NVIDIA’s new hardware, rumors from leaky OneRaichu (via DigitalTrends) suggested that the RTX 5090 could be 70 percent faster than the RTX 4090. (That’s the GPU I previously described as “unholy powerful.”) They also note that some “high-end” cards can see 30 to 40 percent faster. . efficiency. Those benefits may be enough to tempt wealthy RTX 4090 owners to upgrade, but RTX 4070 and 4080 owners may want to skip this generation. With NVIDIA catching up with the RTX 3000 and previous GPUs, however, next year could be the perfect time to upgrade. – Devindra Hardawar, senior reporter
AI PC round 2
Last year, I predicted that AI PCs would dominate CES, and that proved to be true. As 2024 progressed, we saw even more powerful NPUs in chips from Intel, AMD and Qualcomm. Microsoft also doubled down on AI PCs with its Copilot+ program, which provided a big sales boost with artificial intelligence features and premium specs (like having at least 16GB of RAM).
Expect more of the same at CES 2025, alongside more AI stuffed into every product category imaginable. This year, in particular, PC makers may be preparing to take advantage of Windows 10 support that ends next year. Instead of just upgrading your old computer to Windows 11, the likes of Dell and HP are better off buying a new AI PC with the new OS pre-installed.
While 2024 was the year of endless AI PC hype, 2025 could end up being the year of reckoning. Microsoft’s long-delayed recall feature is rolling out to more users, but it’s already showing glaring security holes, such as failing to scrub social security numbers and credit card numbers from screenshots. We were also very impressed with the image production capabilities of Apple Intelligence. PC makers have been eager to talk about the power of AI-powered devices until now, but by 2025 they’ll have to prove they can live up to their grand claims. – DH
The earbuds follow Apple’s lead in hearing health
I am well aware that not all hearing aid companies have the ability to build clinical grade hearing test and hearing aid features into their applications. However, Apple’s recent update to the AirPods Pro 2 should encourage the competition to offer some form of hearing health tools on their flagship products. Jabra was probably better equipped to do this as parent company GN has extensive hearing aid experience. Sadly, the company announced earlier this year that it would no longer be able to make the earbuds.
Samsung and Google are likely to combine something similar to what Apple did for AirPods, given the existing health platforms of both companies. If they did, those announcements are unlikely to be made at CES, as both companies like to host their own hardware events throughout the year.
That leaves Sennheiser as the biggest audio company to regularly introduce earbuds and headphones at CES. Last year, it showed off several new models, including one with heart rate tracking for workouts. Plus, it already offers hearing aids with dedicated devices like the truly wireless Conversation Clear Plus. Those earbuds are more focused on hearing than general content consumption, so it would be nice to see Sennheiser bring some features from that brand to its flagship Momentum line of earbuds. Perhaps a Momentum True Wireless 4 Pro or Plus is on the cards, but the current model is only nine months old.
Of course, there’s plenty of room for other companies to innovate here, and there will be no shortage of new earbuds in Vegas next month. And we often see a lot of useful devices and technologies being introduced at CES, from the big accessible brands like OrCam and all kinds of smaller brands. I just hope that some of the new technology integrates standard hearing aids into models that more people will want to use. – Billy Steele, editor-in-chief
The car’s electrical wiring goes up
As electric vehicle growth approaches 10 percent of new models sold in the US, it’s easy to forget that wheeled vehicles aren’t the only form of transportation seeing a shift to battery-powered driving. Flying taxis have been a mainstay of CES for the past few years, with concept cars from major brands like Hyundai on display in Vegas.
Admittedly, this combination looks more like giant cockpit drones than anything the Jetsons ever dreamed up. But with companies like Archer Aviation and Joby Aviation promising to launch eVTOL (electric vertical takeoff and landing) services by 2025, the era of air taxis may well be here. – Sam Rutherford, senior reporter
Expandable box enhancement features for soundbars
When it comes to the main features of soundbars, there really isn’t a ton of innovation from year to year. Heck, Samsung’s biggest update last year was the addition of HDMI 2.1 support to its flagship model, which should already be there. Companies are also focusing on switching to everything wireless, whether that’s wireless Dolby Atmos or wireless set-top boxes. Sound enhancement features are an area where companies can really rise above the fray, and tools like Sonos’ TV Audio Swap and Bose’s Personal Surround Sound are great examples of this. An important area that almost every company can improve is dialogue boost, a feature that raises the voice or separates spoken words from background noise and music for better clarity.
Sonos has taken a big step forward in this regard with the Arc Ultra, offering two additional settings for so-called Speech Enhancement. Previously, this was an all-or-nothing conversion, which is how most companies handle their versions of this tool. Not only is the Sonos update somewhat customizable, it’s also better, thanks in part to the redesigned design of its new premium soundbar. This is an obvious area where other companies can improve.
LG and Samsung usually announce new soundbars at CES, and there are many smaller companies that will be releasing some as well. I’d like to see them all take the chat enhancements a step further and at least offer more options on how to use it. LG has been using AI Sound Pro on its TVs since 2021 and Samsung is offering something called Adaptive Sound on its home theater speakers. I would expect both of them to generally improve the quality of their features, but I hope they will expand the capabilities as well. – BS
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